


Echoes

by Vertiga



Series: Quietus [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: ALL THE ANGST, Deception, Drug Abuse, Gunshot Wounds, In case of disaster make tea, Lies, M/M, Major character death - Freeform, Police, Rape, Rape Aftermath, Self-Destruction, Suicide, drug overdose, mention of PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-23
Updated: 2013-11-23
Packaged: 2018-01-02 10:24:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1055670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vertiga/pseuds/Vertiga
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Follows immediately from There's Always Something (will make no sense if you don't read that first). </p><p>Sherlock's reaction and the aftermath.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Echoes

‘I’m sorry,’ Sherlock whispers, raw and broken. ‘I am so sorry.’

John sighs. ‘Some things cannot be undone, Sherlock.’ He looks Sherlock in the eye and raises the gun. He presses it against his own temple and takes a deep breath.

Sherlock starts up from the bed, fear clawing icy in his guts. ‘John, no!’

The gunshot is deafening. Blood and bone fragments paint the pale yellow wall to John's right.

John falls, his eyes vacant, bloodshot by the force of the bullet.

Sherlock kneels naked on the bed, hearing nothing but ringing in his ears. He cannot be sure if the gun has deafened him, or if his brain is simply refusing auditory input. 

He can’t breathe. John isn’t breathing, and Sherlock’s lungs have seized in sympathy. There are black spots in his eyes by the time instinct kicks in and makes him draw in a gasping breath. It emerges as a scream.

Sherlock’s hearing comes back all at once, and he wants to flinch from the appalling, animal noise, but he’s the one making it, he’s the one screaming, and he can’t stop. Every time he breathes in, the exhalation is the sick, throbbing keen of a creature wounded beyond endurance. If Sherlock could click his fingers and make himself the true sociopath he claims to be, he would do it now. He never knew feeling could hurt so much.

‘Sherlock! What on earth’s going on?’ Mrs Hudson’s voice calls over the awful noises he can’t stop making. He vaguely registers that she is approaching up the second staircase to John’s room. ‘I heard a gun! You’d better not be shooting at my bloody walls!’

She shoves the door open, the movement catching Sherlock’s peripheral vision. He can’t take his eyes off John.

‘Oh my God,’ Mrs Hudson whispers. Her hand flies to her mouth, and Sherlock hears her give a dry sob.

There is an endless moment punctuated only by Sherlock’s racking, moaning cries, then Mrs Hudson draws herself up with the strength of will that carried her through a marriage that would have broken most people.

‘Sherlock,’ she says gently, approaching the bed. ‘Sherlock, love, stop.’

Sherlock can’t. He can’t even look at her. He did this. John is dead, and he died betrayed and horrified, and Sherlock did it to him. John would have found more mercy in Afghanistan than Sherlock showed in his own bedroom.

He feels Mrs Hudson wrap her arms around him, utterly heedless of his nakedness, and the warm touch of her soft cardigan shows him how cold his own skin has become. Her warmth soaks into him, and his breath gradually stops seizing in his throat, stops forcing itself out in terrible, guttural noises.

‘It’s alright, love. Shhh, you’re alright, just breathe,’ Mrs Hudson is saying, a litany of childish nonsense that would repulse Sherlock if he had access to his usual scathing intellect. As it is, his brain might as well have a bullet in it too. It won’t move past John’s body, won’t stop analysing the ruin of his skull, the distribution of the blood, helpfully reminding him that the Sig Sauer P226 semi-automatic pistol would have sent that bullet through John with a muzzle velocity of approximately 1,150 feet per second, and that suicide by gun isn’t as certain a method as people think. It’s easy to blow away part of your brain, leaving you in a coma, or brain damaged, or paralysed, depending on the location of the damage, but killing yourself instantly is harder than you’d expect, especially given that people tend to flinch when they pull the trigger. John did it, though – no flinch, no hesitation. John knows – knew – what he was doing, both a soldier and a doctor, that delicious duality of healer and killer giving him all the knowledge he needed to be absolutely sure his death was as near instant as makes no difference. To be absolutely sure Sherlock couldn’t stop him.

Sherlock goes quiet, and Mrs Hudson reaches for John’s phone on the bedside table – _Harry Watson from Clara XXX._ Sherlock’s first deductive failure after meeting John. How he’d cursed himself for it then, and how insignificant it seems now! Sherlock will never deduce anything about anyone again, he swears it. And if he has to permanently destroy his brain to stop himself, so be it.

‘Hello, Detective Inspector Lestrade?’ Mrs Hudson is saying, with extraordinary calm. ‘Yes, it’s Mrs Hudson. Yes. You need to come to Baker Street at once. The upstairs bedroom. And you need to bring a body bag, or a coroner, or whatever the official thing is. No, it’s not Sherlock, it’s John. I’m sorry.’

Lestrade’s answering curse is so loud even Sherlock hears it.

‘No, I’m with him,’ Mrs Hudson replies to some query, her arm tightening instinctively around Sherlock. ‘No, I won’t. Goodbye.’

By the time Lestrade arrives, Mrs Hudson has tucked John’s blue-and-grey striped dressing gown firmly around Sherlock like a shock blanket. It smells like John’s shaving foam, like the cheap shampoo he uses, and having it against his skin is a deeper torment than Mrs Hudson could possibly know. Sherlock burrows deeper into it, taking the agonising pain in his chest as his just reward.

Lestrade’s shoes pounding up the stairs are unmistakable. He takes the steps two at a time, and pushes open the door. He stops, taking in the tableau.

‘Jesus bloody Christ,’ he says, all in one exhale. He turns away, pokes his head out of the door and shouts down the stairs. ‘Everyone stay out a minute!’

Donovan’s shrill voice replies, too quiet for Sherlock to make out the words.

‘No, it’s not a crime scene, it’s not an issue of contamination! Just wait a minute!’ Lestrade shouts back, his voice cracking on the order. He steps back into the room and shuts the door.

 _Not a crime scene,_ Sherlock thinks. If only Lestrade knew! _You can’t tell him,_ he thinks at once, the first calm and rational thought to pass through his head since the gunshot wiped his mind clean. He has no intention of being taken into custody, being dragged through the courts and put in jail, much though that might be seen as a fitting punishment for someone who has done something so hideous to their only true friend. No, for Sherlock, nothing short of utter self-destruction will do, and for that he has to remain at liberty, deserved or not.

‘Sherlock, what happened?’ Lestrade asks, sounding wrecked.

At last, Sherlock turns his head, breaks eye contact with John and looks at the Inspector. Lestrade is visibly struggling to maintain any kind of professional veneer, grief and shock writ large on his face. Of course – he and John were friends, they interacted in a way Sherlock never has. It occurs to Sherlock that, for all that he was a private sort of man, John made friends easily. The Yard, the surgery, old army friends, Stamford, Harry. His death will affect far more people than Sherlock’s own, and Sherlock is responsible for all their pain. The realisation is like acid in his guts, and he almost doubles over.

He hides the motion by tugging John’s dressing down tighter around himself, and takes a deep breath. He has to seem rational, can’t be considered a suicide risk, a danger to himself.

 _The consumate actor gives one last performance,_ Sherlock thinks, and draws his sociopathic mask firmly over his horror.

‘I would have thought that was obvious,’ Sherlock says. ‘John killed himself. Shot himself in the left temple with a British Army issue Sig Sauer P226 semi-automatic pistol, to be precise. Probably brought it with him when he was discharged. I doubt anyone noticed – they never do keep good track of weapons in a war zone.’

‘Jesus,’ Lestrade says, scrubbing a hand over his face. ‘I can see–’ his voice breaks. ‘I can see John shot himself, looks like textbook suicide, not that we see a lot of gun suicides, but I’m asking you why the fuck he did it!’

Sherlock bites his tongue. He can’t say why. ‘I think it was a flashback,’ he lies, feeling like dirt for using John’s service, his bravery, to make him culpable for his own death. But nothing Sherlock says now could be worse than what he’s already done. He’ll pay for all of it, soon enough. ‘John has had PTSD episodes before. He was acting out of character, got out of bed, got dressed, then took the gun out of the drawer and shot himself.’

Sherlock knows full well that most of the Yard thinks he and John have been sleeping together for months. He’d curse that assumption, given that it matches his own utter failure of observation, but right now it’s a blessing. None of them are going to question his naked presence in John’s bed – not before he’s already gone, anyway. That’s all he needs now.

‘And he didn’t say why?’

‘No,’ Sherlock snaps. ‘Look, Lestrade, I’m undeniably in shock. I’ll come down to the station tomorrow and give you as long and speculative a statement as you wish, but for God’s sake don’t interrogate me right now!’

Lestrade hesitates, taken aback by Sherlock’s vitriol, but eventually he gives a slow nod. ‘Go downstairs, Sherlock. I’ll get things cleaned up in here, take – Jesus – take John down to the morgue. You can come in when you’re ready.’

‘Thank you,’ Sherlock says softly. What he means is _I’m sorry._ What he means is _It’s my fault._ What he means is _Goodbye._

He struggles off the bed and goes downstairs on wobbly, numb legs, Mrs Hudson trailing down after him. 

Sergeant Donovan is waiting in the living room with a forensic unit. A black plastic body bag waits for John. Sherlock sees it and almost screams again, biting it back to a dry sob at the last second. Even so, Donovan looks at him like he’s suddenly a stranger.

Lestrade calls his team upstairs and they leave him, Donovan glancing back pityingly to where he’s sitting on the sofa in John’s too-short dressing gown. If she knew the truth of it, pity would be the last thing on her mind. She’d crow endlessly that she always knew he was sick, always knew he was a freak who’d betray them all in the end. Sherlock knows that she’d be right, always has been right, and it burns bitter in his guts.

Mrs Hudson brings him a pair of his own cotton pyjama bottoms and he pulls them on mechanically while she clatters about in the kitchen making tea. _The British cure-all,_ Sherlock thinks. _In the face of utter disaster, we make tea._ As if tea could ever cure a pain as deep as the one lancing through him now.

He takes the offered mug and holds it, lets it burn his palms without complaint. He stays like that, sitting beside Mrs Hudson on the sofa, while the police traipse up and down the stairs, move John’s body and clean away the worst of the splatter, restoring the bedroom to some semblance of reality. If only it could be that easy.

When Lestrade has gone, repeating his instruction for Sherlock to come to the Yard when he’s ready, it doesn’t take much to convince Mrs Hudson to leave.

‘I’m going to bed,’ Sherlock tells her. ‘I can’t – I need to sleep, it won’t seem real until the morning.’

It’s morning already, the sky lightening to the grey of dawn, but she isn’t pedantic enough to point it out.

‘If you’re sure, dear,’ she says, patting his hand. ‘I’ll be right downstairs if you want company. I know how quickly what you need can change, when you’ve had a nasty shock.’

‘I’m sure,’ Sherlock says. ‘Thank you, Mrs Hudson.’ What he means is _I’m sorry. I’m sorry you had to see someone you were fond of lying dead on the floor, and I’m sorry you’re probably going to find me the same way._ What he means is _It’s my fault, and I can’t pay for it, not even by destroying myself, but I can’t live with it either._ What he means is _Goodbye._

She leaves him alone, and he goes to his own room only for long enough to pry up the windowsill and get at the little metal box hidden underneath. None of the drugs busts or John’s anxious searches have ever found this box, hidden in the very fabric of the house to be brought out at the utmost end of his rope.  
He takes the box into the living room and sits back down on the sofa, cradling it in his hands. The metal is cold, and he thinks the gun must have been cold when John touched it, too. 

He waits until Mrs Hudson has gone to bed, and it is eerily silent in the flat, before he opens the box. The sterile hypodermic and glass bottle of morphine have been hidden for months, but they are still ready to use. There is more than enough morphine for his purposes. The sound of the liquid filling the syringe is overpowering in the pre-dawn quiet.

He lies back on the sofa, staring up at the ceiling, imagining that he can see right through the plaster to the blood-soaked carpet above. He cannot undo what he did, what he forced John into doing, but perhaps if John can see him, he will know this for the penance it is.

The needle is touching the blue-white skin of his inner elbow, barely pricking the vein, when he hears the front door quietly swing open again. Soft footfalls sound on the stairs, slow and calm, and Sherlock almost smiles. 

‘Good morning, Mycroft,’ Sherlock says, sinking the needle into his arm and pressing the plunger. The morphine is cold in his blood, chilling his body in preparation for the numbness that will swiftly follow. ‘No last minute attempt to stop me?’

Mycroft sighs. He crosses the room and sits on the coffee table in front of the sofa, looking down at Sherlock. ‘Would it do any good?’ he asks softly. ‘For all our differences, I know my little brother. If I stopped you now, got you to the hospital, I would never be able to let you alone again. Your life would be one long parade of sedatives and restraints to keep you from trying again, and even so, it would fail in the end. I won’t do that to you.’

‘You saw?’ Sherlock asks, his tongue already starting to feel thick in his mouth.

‘Heard, actually,’ Mycroft says. ‘There are no cameras in the bedrooms – I do have some small sense of privacy. Still, hearing was enough for me to predict what you’d do.’

‘I was wrong. I killed him,’ Sherlock slurs.

‘Yes,’ Mycroft agrees. He never has sugar-coated anything for Sherlock’s sake. It would be an insult to both their intellects. ‘But killing him killed you, and I think John would agree that more than evens the score.’

‘Maybe I’ll get to apologise.’ Sherlock has never held any concrete faith, but he has never discarded the possibility of something more, or at least not as firmly as a logical man might be expected to. If energy cannot be destroyed, it makes little sense for a whole person to simply stop. Now, more than ever before, he wants there to be something more. He would gladly spend eternity trying to make this right with John.

‘Maybe you will,’ Mycroft agrees, leaning closer. ‘I’m sorry, Sherlock.’

‘M’ sorry.’ His eyelids are heavy. He closes them. The hot ache of grief and guilt in his chest begins to ease. 

The last thing he feels is Mycroft’s hand carding gently through his hair.


End file.
